lightroom? the adobe photoshop lightroom? i just had a look at it, and i think its overkill for my needs! hahah. people have been saying picassa, but i just found out that its for windows only...is that true?
are there no other applications for my simple, pure-viewing purposes?

Yep Picasa is Windows only. Are you willing to pay for a program or would you prefer freeware? Shoebox is a great program for just viewing photo's, but it's not free. Apart from importing photo's into it, you can view them by folder view (kind of like what you want)

hmm, automator certainly does automate the importing, but its not exactly how to way i like it to work. It imports everytime i drop a photo into the folder - i was thinking of just import all at once when i power up my iphoto. And it reimports the existing photos in the folder. any workaround? thanks

hmm, automator certainly does automate the importing, but its not exactly how to way i like it to work. It imports everytime i drop a photo into the folder - i was thinking of just import all at once when i power up my iphoto. And it reimports the existing photos in the folder. any workaround? thanks

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im not sure how to do it so it only imports when iphoto is being launched. You could have it import at a certain time each day though.

Regarding reimoprting. I would create a new folder that you you drop all your photos into. link the automator workflow to that folder (both save the plugin as a folder action for that folder and selecting that folder in the automator action) and set up a new action to copy the photo(s) to a permanent folder.

3: Copy Finder Items
Your permanent folder.

There is another way you could add another criteria to step 1 (and completely ignore step 3) if you drop the folders on the day they are created or modified. But if you upload new pictures twice the same day you will get duplicate entries

EDIT: obviously if you chose to to setup a different folder for folder actions then you should disable the folder action for the previous one

thanks numlock.
but it seems there's no straightforward way to iphoto to suit my needs, which is just viewing really. perhaps i should just stick to finder.
and yea, shoebox is somewhat the thing i need, although i haven't fiddled with it much yet.

When I googled "autoimport iPhoto" this thread is returned as the first result, but it doesn't provide a satisfactory solution to the original post. Until now.This article from Macworld describes a drag-and-drop solution to batch-importing photos into iPhoto without repeatedly opening iPhoto.

When I googled "autoimport iPhoto" this thread is returned as the first result, but it doesn't provide a satisfactory solution to the original post. Until now.This article from Macworld describes a drag-and-drop solution to batch-importing photos into iPhoto without repeatedly opening iPhoto.

Click to expand...

This looks promising. Do you think that this Auto Import folder could be saved to a separate data partition of the HD, so that when photos and videos are dropped into the folder they would auto-import into iPhoto located on the OSX partition? I would also like for the same photos and videos to import into Windows Live Photo Gallery located on yet another partition of the HD, but I am pretty sure that can be done. End result that I want is that anytime I save any videos or photos to this Auto Import folder located on a data partition, the videos and photos will automatically appear in iPhoto and Windows Live Photo Gallery.

This looks promising. Do you think that this Auto Import folder could be saved to a separate data partition of the HD, so that when photos and videos are dropped into the folder they would auto-import into iPhoto located on the OSX partition? I would also like for the same photos and videos to import into Windows Live Photo Gallery located on yet another partition of the HD, but I am pretty sure that can be done. End result that I want is that anytime I save any videos or photos to this Auto Import folder located on a data partition, the videos and photos will automatically appear in iPhoto and Windows Live Photo Gallery.

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Yes you can do it in the same way, that's how I run it actually. I have one library for each year since I have over 30 thousand pictures @3.5 mb each. My Libraries became too heavy even though I use the new macbook pro. I have them on a network hard drive (that's the only reason for the delay). I did this not only to clear up my hard drive but to share the library with my wife and to be able to remotelly access it from anywhere.

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